File is working very slowly

[Ericksom-Da-Veiga]

What Happened?

File is taking a long time to open and to open folders and files(much slower than normal).
it was working but about 3 days ago it just started giving errors when I try to open it (sends message that it stopped working and closes), after it started to open but running very very slow

Steps to Reproduce

1 - juste open Files and try to open some folder

Expected Behavior

1 - run at normal speed

OS Version

7.x (Horus)

Software Version

Latest release (I have run all updates)

Log Output

No response

Hardware Info

No response

[jeremypw]

Please give more detail about the folders you are opening e.g. how many files they contain, what type and whether they are local or remote. How long does it take to open and does it depend on the size of the folder? I can see no change in speed with the latest release (v6.5.3) with folders containing up to 2000 files.

[Ericksom-Da-Veiga]

It lasts on average between 5 seconds to open any folder, even empty folders takes 5 seconds to open, so it doesn't seem to depend on the size of the folders
All the folders I've tried to open are locally saved folders
It takes 5 seconds for the application to start.
I'm using the latest release(v6.5.3)

I'm also using dolphin installed in flatpak and all folders are opening normally (I don't know if that's helpful)

[jeremypw]

That's strange especially if it happens even for empty folders. It may give a clue if you have gnome-system-monitor running (or htop in a terminal) while starting and using Files and noting what is happening during the five seconds wait e.g. is Files (or something else) using a lot of CPU? Is there a lot of disk or network activity? Even better if you can run Files under gdb and interrupt it during the 5 second wait to see what line of code is running (but that requires some development experience).

[jeremypw]

The only recent change to Files is #2412 and that has not been released yet. If you are running the stable release of elementary then Files has not changed at all since December. So the cause is probably some upstream change in the system.

[Ericksom-Da-Veiga]

What I've noticed using htop is that right before the program opens the CPU usage goes up to 100%
The same happens when I try to open folders (including empty folders and folders with subfolders.
however when i go to 'Recent' in the file the folder opened quickly(normal speed) and there is no increase in cpu usage

Hardware information
CPU: Quad-Core Intel® Core(TM) i7-10510U CPU @ 1.80GHz
Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics
RAM: 16 GB memory
SSD: 512 GB storage (NVMe SSD)

[jeremypw]

That's interesting, and would explain the delay. I assume that the 100% CPU usage is associated with the io.elementary.files process? If so it is actively doing something rather than idling waiting for another process to do something. In that case, running Files under gdb in a terminal then pressing <Ctrl>C (in the terminal) during the delay followed by bt should give some idea of what it is doing. (The other Files processes are io.elementary.files-daemon and io.elementary.files-xdg-desktop-portal - were either of these consuming cpu?) Did you notice if there was a shortage of disk or memory space causing a lot of swapping? I would say that on my system opening Files makes a barely discernible impact on cpu and memory and network traffic.

"Recent" is a virtual folder created by the system rather than a real one on disk so should be faster to read.